After closure notice, Centaur hotel staff fear for their jobs

Fearing they will be moved out of the city or will be asked to take voluntary retirement, the employees have also asked for wage review, which is pending since 2007.

Rattled by the announcement of the closure of Centaur Hotel near Delhi Airport, about 400 employees have written to the civil aviation ministry, asking for jobs in one of the subsidiaries under the ministry.

The Centaur Hotel was constructed as part of New Delhi’s preparation for the 1982 Asian Games. It is just a stone’s throw away from the airport.

Fearing they will be moved out of the city or will be asked to take voluntary retirement, the employees have also asked for wage review, which is pending since 2007.

“We demand for alternative employment in companies under the ministry of civil aviation — like Air India and its subsidiary companies — and implementation of our long-pending wage revision and payment of all arrears,” the employees’ representatives said in the letter.

The Centaur hotel, built as part of New Delhi’s preparation for 1982 Asian Games, will be demolished by the end of the year and replaced by an elevated taxiway that will enhance the capacity of the country’s busiest Indira Gandhi International Airport.

Centaur’s demolition will leave Hotel Corporation of India with just the Lake View Centaur in Srinagar.

The Delhi Centaur’s peers in Mumbai, the Airport Centaur and the Juhu Centaur, have had better luck. Both the Mumbai hotels were sold as part of the first National Democratic Alliance’s disinvestment drive. The former is now run by the Sahara group (it was originally sold to Batra Hospitality), and the latter is now the Tulip Star Hotel.

The Delhi Centaur, literally a stone’s throw from the airport (especially for someone with a strong arm), haven’t been so lucky. It wasn’t sold for a variety of reasons. And, over the past two decades, it has slowly faded.

The Centaur Hotel may have been a victim of the rapid development Delhi saw in the late 1980s and 1990s.

“Despite being under stress over wages and uncertainty over its future, we gave our best to the hotel. Now, we are at such an age where we will not get any other job. Air India must accommodate us in Delhi instead of sending us to any other city,” one of the employee told HT.

Now left with about 400 staff, most of whom have less than five years of service left, the government will have to take a call on their posting. Since, all the staff are permanent, they are eligible to be offered postings in other cities but the online hospitality business Air India is left with, is a catering unit in Mumbai.

According to an order issued on July 29, the civil aviation ministry has asked the Hotel Corporation of India to hand over the land occupied by the Centaur Hotel at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) and two Chefair flight kitchens to the Airports Authority of India (AAI) by November 30 this year.

“We have been working under extreme stress and adverse conditions especially in the last couple of years as quite a few employees have superannuated and the workload has increased manifold. We have been putting our sincere efforts and have no stone left unturned for the betterment of the corporation but the management has never thought of ending our agony or providing us any relief, monetary or otherwise,” the letter reads.

“We will take care of the interest of our employees,” said Dhananjay Kumar, spokesperson for Air India.